What is neither Law nor Chaos?

For 'Dynamic Quality' you can substitute the word 'Tao' or whatever you want -- basically the thing that organizes the universe, that 'decides' which state an electron assumes and informs the universe of which configurations are 'better' than some more chaotic or more rigid alternative. No bets on whether it is 'intelligent' or 'conscious' or whatever other human-centric word we want to use to try to describe it...

Another excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila:

“It seems clear that no mechanistic pattern exists toward which life is heading, but has the question been taken up of whether life is heading away from mechanistic patterns?”

He guessed that the question had not been taken up at all. The concepts necessary for taking it up were not at hand. In a metaphysics in which static universal laws are considered fundamental, the idea that life is evolving away from any law just draws a baffled question mark. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems to say that all life is headed toward chaos, since chaos is the only alternative to structural patterns that a law-bound metaphysics can conceive.

But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by any static patterns. What the substance-centered evolutionists were showing with their absence of final “mechanisms” or “programs” was not an air-tight case for the biological goallessness of life. What they were unintentionally showing was a superb example of how values create reality.

Science values static patterns. Its business is to search for them. When non-conformity appears it is considered an interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that “reality” which follows from mechanisms and programs. The other worthless stuff which doesn’t follow mechanisms and programs we don’t pay any attention to.

See how this works? A thing doesn’t exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have better things to do.

Because of his different metaphysical orientation Phaedrus saw instantly that those seemingly trivial, unimportant, “spur of the moment” decisions that Mayr was talking about [“No program controlled or directed evolution. It was result of spur of the moment decisions of natural selection.”], the decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as “spur of the moment.” Where else could it appear?

~ Pirsig, Lila, 142